The doable future: making AI's biggest promises a reality in 2026 | Episode 208

Join SADA's CTO, Miles Ward, and Associate CTO of AI & ML, Simon Margolis, for this special and final episode of the Cloud and Clear podcast. They share their biggest, most impactful predictions for 2026 and beyond, focusing on the massive shift required for businesses to get value from AI.

Miles and Simon discuss how the conversation around AI investment is changing. Boards will no longer tolerate putting AI in the R&D bucket. The focus is shifting from "what's possible" to "what's profitable," demanding financial returns on a quarterly basis.

In this insightful discussion, you will learn:

• The model choice: Why optimizing your model selection matters, noting that a model like Gemini Pro 2.5 can have output tokens that are 25 times more expensive than Gemini Flash.
• Service as software: The need to think of your business as a new startup, building "machinery to let you run service as if it's software."
• Democratization: How "anybody that knows their natural language is able to go and build some type of truly agentic system." The ability to build a prototype with a prompt is replacing lengthy Product Requirement Documents (PRDs).
• The luxury trap: Why reducing friction will become a required, contractually obligated expectation. This includes developing "user interfaces for an audience of one" to accommodate different customer cohorts.

If you are a technology leader, cloud engineer, or executive looking to set your strategy for the next wave of transformation, this episode is packed with valuable knowledge. And even though this is the last Cloud and Clear, the journey continues with InsightON!

Connect with SADA & InsightON:

• Check out all of our experts' 2026 predictions: https://sada.com/blog/2026-technology-trends/

• InsightON: insight.com/InsightOn

Host: Miles Ward, Chief Technology Officer, SADA, An Insight company

Guest: Simon Margolis, Associate CTO of AI & ML, SADA, An Insight company